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Advice to Young Web Developers

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Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#101

Post by arcin »

kvetching wrote: post #96

"Give people consistent but random stimulus and you will be habit-forming. Getting people hooked on your product might seem like a good idea, but the tobacco industry feels the same way." DO NOT Listen to this. Make your site as addictive as possible. It can only help you win at life. More users = more impact = more money = better life. So long as it's not porn, your website won't be as bad as tobacco.

I think this is a little tone deaf to the target audience. Not all developers want to aspire to extracting the maximum amount of resources from users. Some, especially beginners who want to code, just want to build something and build it well.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#102

Post by henryfjordan »

xemdetia wrote: post #32
hpen wrote: post #19

Why so much hate for infinite scrolls? What if your content is "infinite". I can't see a better way to handle that.

The infinite scroll problem I feel comes up most that if there was a useful piece of information in the middle of an infinite scroll it is likely impossible for you to return there with any sort of reliability. You can't save the URL because it probably doesn't encode anything useful about where you are in a most cases. You can't logically organize 'where' this information is because its location is pure happenstance…

You don't dislike infinite scroll, you dislike "Social Media Feeds".

Imagine you are on a blog and can scroll back through all the posts chronologically in an infinite scroll. The location of that data isn't happenstance. You can always address a particular post or scroll to a certain date.

"Social Media Feeds" are bad not because they're infinite but because the sourcing algorithm is obscured from you likely to drive "increased engagement" or something nefarious like that. Pagination isn't going to fix social media feeds.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#103

Post by hootbootscoot »

nepeckman wrote: post #93
austincheney wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue most websites never require any of those. When any of those are required they don’t need a giant framework to achieve maintainability. All that’s needed to achieve maintainability is a competent developer who values both simplicity and written documentation.

This sentiment frustrates me. The majority of web developers today are application developers. I've spent the past 5 years delivering business applications via the web as a platform. The web has a lot of advantage as a platform: no install, cross platform, networked by default. But the web was not designed as an application platform, so making it into one is complex. Business applications have inherent complexity as…

I would qualify this: The web is simple when one uses it as intended. (hyperlinked documents that may or may not have interactivity beyond the hyperlinking and embedded media or animations etc.) The web is complex when one attempts to do "GUI by RPC". If one is OK with page reloads, this asynch remote folder browser hypercard thingy is fine. If one seeks to replicate the event-loop desktop "window"-based application one will have the use-case for large frameworks as one will literally be re-inventing all the wheels, which they tend to do, as this is not the default behavior of the application we call a web browser.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#104

Post by TheGoodBarn »

laurentdc wrote: post #27
CM30 wrote: post #18

Seems like a list of every web development ideal that gets upvoted on Hacker News. Still, I think the list can pretty much condensed down to one point: Use whatever technology is appropriate for this site or web app. Because a lot of developers seem to have a 'when all you have is a hammer' attitude towards web development. They learn React/Vue/Angular/whatever, then seemingly decide everything they will ever build w…

I can't count the times I've started to write some basic internal tool with React only to rm -rf everything 1 hour later and replace it with 20 lines of jQuery/vanilla js

Such an underrated comment.

I think theres some validity to "you're the most productive with whichever tools you're most comfortable/familiar with", but I think people don't realize the levels of abstraction that come with web development.

( My learning path was: Angular 2 -> 7 + sucking at CSS, Angular + Tachyons (learning how to style), -> Angular + Custom CSS for everything, to Vue + Custom css -> Plain HTML + Plain CSS. )

Its like the more you learn the more you understand the boilerplate of libs/frameworks, but also understand what these large tools accomplish for you, and then you learn to appreciate how powerful & simple the "vanilla" web can be if you open your mind to it.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#105

Post by runawaybottle »

osrec wrote: post #86
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the site we’re communicating on right now be improved if it were rebuilt as an SPA?

Threading could be clearer. Less data would need to be loaded on each page load. I can imagine that a lightweight SPA to handle the a few standard views (e.g. listItems, itemDetails, profile, changePassword, submit) would cut down data transfer by a significant margin (20-30%, maybe more). The UI could also be much better on mobile, and we could give users the option to cache certain pieces of content offline.

What you’re suggesting is heresy on HN. It’s true, a little bit of interactivity, fonts/padding/spacing would improve HN. To this day my thumb covers both the upvote and down vote button.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#106

Post by lsalvatore »

Advice to Young Frontend Web Developers: Use React. HTML is not a rich enough framework to do client work.

Second article in a row here advocating for HTML purism. That is where I jump in and talk about how React changed my career in 2015. Since then, my life has had a measurable impact because of how easy building apps became thanks to React. There is no app where I would consider not using React including landing pages.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#107

Post by TheGoodBarn »

paxys wrote: post #79
duskwuff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally just a folder full of perfectly normal HTML files. You don't need Javascript or a SPA to double-click one of those and look at it in a browser. Even better, if your operating system has full-text file indexing, it'll be able to search them normally.

Sure, but you also have to manually redownload the entire site whenever there is a change.

To a degree though, thats where PWAs come in.

Websites like https://devdocs.io/ do this exact thing through desktop Progressive Web Apps.

Basically you keep your markup & source as static as possible, and allow a serviceWorker to cache those files locally. This can also be done with a SPA, but if we're talking docs, you get the benefit of only having to update a specific page if its raw html.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#108

Post by austincheney »

nepeckman wrote: post #93
austincheney wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue most websites never require any of those. When any of those are required they don’t need a giant framework to achieve maintainability. All that’s needed to achieve maintainability is a competent developer who values both simplicity and written documentation.

This sentiment frustrates me. The majority of web developers today are application developers. I've spent the past 5 years delivering business applications via the web as a platform. The web has a lot of advantage as a platform: no install, cross platform, networked by default. But the web was not designed as an application platform, so making it into one is complex. Business applications have inherent complexity as…

Complexity in web products is largely the result of developers who don’t care because they need to ship a product only if that product is written in an extremely familiar way. That’s a product of people who don’t know what they are doing opposed to inherent technological impediments.

I form this opinion as a professional web developer with 20 years experience.

Re: Advice to Young Web Developers

#110

Post by [deleted] »

lucasmullens wrote: post #33

> To the developer, “isomorphic” code breaks down the barrier between client and server. To a malicious client, it means they have control over the server too. Huh? I don't follow this. Sharing some helpful util functions between the frontend and backend doesn't allow malicious clients to control your server.

[deleted]
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